What Should We Do About Global Warming?
This activity received a gold star rating from a Panel Peer Review
HideThis resource received a gold-star rating from a Panel Peer Review
These materials were reviewed using face-to-face NSF-style review panel of geoscience and geoscience education experts to review groups of resources addressing a single theme. Panelists wrote reviews that addressed the criteria:
- scientific accuracy and currency
- usability and
- pedagogical effectiveness
- Accept
- Accept with minor revisions
- Accept with major revisions, or
- Reject.
Following the panel meetings, the conveners wrote summaries of the panel discussion for each resource; these were transmitted to the creator, along with anonymous versions of the reviews. Relatively few resources were accepted as is. In most cases, the majority of the resources were either designated as 1) Reject or 2) Accept with major revisions. Resources were most often rejected for their lack of completeness to be used in a classroom or they contained scientific inaccuracies.
This material is replicated on a number of sites as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service Project
Summary
This 3-4 week science module is designed for introductory college courses and uses data to tackle questions related to global warming. The module includes short and long term temperature trend data, along with IR spectra, concentration trend data for greenhouse gases, and information about the Kyoto Protocol. Many of the data are in graphs that are part of Quicktime movies.
Learning Goals
Students will:
- Use data and visualizations to study greenhouse gases and their relationship to global warming.
- Examine the problem of global warming and its significance.
- Evaluate the Kyoto Protocol.
- Summarize what they have learned, using scientific data to support their conclusions.
Context for Use
The module is broken into eight sessions (DLESE suggests 3-4 weeks of class time).
Teaching Materials
Most of the module is the data, so the instructor will want to download:
- The modules and movies from the authors' original website: What Should We Do About Global Warming? (more info)
- The Quicktime Reader to play them
Teaching Notes and Tips
The material on the web site is only an outline, providing computer simulations and data-filled graphs that the instructor will want to build into a curriculum, either by writing lectures around them or creating worksheets and having the students work through them or both.
Assessment
The module should conclude with a synthetic activity that will require the students to summarize what they have learned during the module and to support their conclusions with scientific data. They recommend that the instructor consider papers, debates, posters, and discussions and include several links to Kyoto Protocol resources hinting broadly at a role-played debate, set either in Congress (with the students representing a variety of interest groups) or in Kyoto (where they could represent different countries).
References and Resources
Interactive role-playing exercises dealing with the complicated issue of humanity's dependence on fossil fuels and its consequences include:
- Mock Environmental Summit
At the end of a six-week class or unit on global warming, students role-play representatives from various countries and organizations at an international summit on global warming.
- The Great Energy Debate
This lesson plan explores the energy debate in the U.S. Students will hold a mock congressional committee meeting and make decisions about public lands and energy resources.
- What Should We Do About Global Warming?
This module contains an 8-lesson curriculum to study greenhouse gases and global warming using data and visualizations. The students will summarize the issue in a mock debate or a presentation.
- WorldWatcher Project: Global Warming Project
In this exercise, students role-play advisors to various heads of state on the subject of global warming. The web site also has free modeling and GIS software and lesson and lab plans.
